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Canada got the last hurrah at the Celebration of Light Saturday evening, closing the three-night event with a winning display. Canada was declared the winner of the event, with Brazil and China finishing second and third, respectively.

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The whale-watching industry knows them as “muggings.” But to their paying clients in the Salish Sea, unusually close encounters with certain juvenile humpback whales can be the experience of a lifetime.

A $32-million commercial fishery has inexplicably and completely collapsed this year on the B.C. coast. The sardine seine fleet has gone home after failing to catch a single fish. And the commercial disappearance of the small schooling fish is having repercussions all the way up the food chain to threatened humpback whales.

ECHACHISHT — Joe Martin and Jim Darling sit on a grassy mound rising from a stretch of shoreline where ancient Nuu-chah-nulth whalers once brought their immense prey to be butchered. Martin, a canoe carver from Tla-oqui-aht village, and Darling, a whale biologist, are unified in their desire to know what this mound contains and how it might provide insight to ancient cultures and changes in marine ecosystems.

The U.S. government's long-running review of a Washington-based tribe's contentious bid to hunt grey whales off the Pacific Coast has been halted after a team of Canadian scientists discovered that a genetically distinct group of just 200 whales living around the Canada-U.S maritime boundary — along with the wider population of 20,000 — could be affected by the proposed harvest.

The proposed Northern Gateway Pipeline threatens critical habitat of humpback whales off the coast of British Columbia, says newly released internal federal documents from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans.

VICTORIA — When Ombudsman Jay Chalke was handed the job of investigating those botched firings in the health ministry this week, he offered multiple assurances to the public that his office would do its best to get to the bottom of the murky affair. “I am committed to a diligent and professional investigation into this matter,” he vowed in a statement issued by his office after a legislature committee referred the matter to him.